Getting the most from your Ad Networks + Weekly Update 5/24
This isn't the best update we've ever done
Welcome to the 6th weekly update from scrolller!
Our Slack channel has been buzzing with activity recently as the team ramps up its efforts to accomplish the ever-growing list of issues, updates, and new features for Scrolller. If you want to keep up to date and learn more about how we are growing our application, please subscribe and join our journey.
As you can see the top of our list is developing systems to help with our content recommendation system. The more people sign up for premium the more resources we will have to execute on all of these updates. Now on to the update.
User Accounts
150190 → 159223 We continue our slow decline in user account growth. This is disappointing, but not unexpected given we haven't done much to drive more user account growth.
In a previous weekly update, we discussed a few ways we could increase the number of user accounts. Including creating an application where it would be required to log in, adding a call to action to create an account, and increasing our pro-metric advertisements.
Progress on this front has been very slow, mostly owing to our focus on solving user-facing issues and content recommendations. If anyone of our readers has a low-cost effect way of boosting our user registration numbers I'd love to get on-call and chat about it!
Revenue
We are working on a new way of handling ads in our app. We are aware of the fact that some users find the current implementation a bit obtrusive and miss the olden days of ad-free Scrolller. However, this is all necessary to make Scrolller a sustainable business and we are close to launching a new implementation that will both optimize the experience of our users and the growth of our revenue.
While working in the gaming industry I noticed a trend, most game developers used 1 ad network to power their monetization, usually, this ad network was ad mob or unity. Ad networks work by getting a lot of ad inventory together and then testing that inventory against your users to find advertising that works well (Higher conversion). In theory, it is a simple recipe and works well enough, but if you look deeper into traffic and conversion rates you will see something happening.
Ad Networks even Google's is biased in their advertising towards whatever market they primarily serve. There are hundreds of ad networks from many different countries and they are all making deals with other companies to be the home of their advertisements. It is difficult for one Ad to be on all networks (That would imply a company contacted all 100's ad networks), so this bias is seen across all networks regardless of size.
Ad Network mediation is the process of using multiple ad networks and tailoring who to show what network in order to get the best chance of a conversion. We play to the strength of each individual network (AdMob works best in tier 1 countries). With the new monetization optimizations that our team is working on, we will be able to implement mediation at scale for all of our users.
Social Traffic (0.6 → 0.6)
This week we are bringing on a new hire who will be running the customer success and growth hacking projects. Everyone's emails should be answered more quickly than before and we can start working on building a database on online communities we can share Scrolller links with. The end result will hopefully be growth in the social traffic share of our site.
General Update
We are aware that many users miss some of the older Scrolller features; however, bringing them back as fast as possible is not our main priority now.
We keep looking for the best way to build Scrolller into the best content experience. Hacking together large changes would make the progress faster, but would make our system less sustainable in the long term. As such, radical changes in the UX are out of the question after Scrolller 2.0 was released, but that doesn't mean we aren't making it better. Every week we are refactoring the app, testing our current code, and generating ideas that often lead to debates on our internal Slack channel. Once we figure everything out the features will start coming both faster and with greater stability.
Content Recommendation
The team got together this week and discussed content recommendations. Right now we are deciding how we can track user-content interactions in order to best serve the recommendations to our clients.
Road Map
This week
Collect Emails from older accounts that don't have emails
[Issue] Login Error - "Could not connect to database" at wrong password
[Feature] Update Content Reporting System
Refactor Gallery View/Infinite Scroll
[Issue] Users complaining that their favorites are not showing up
Combine auto-scroll and slideshow functionality
Monetization update and optimization
Refactor admin-panel to TypeScript
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements